17. aug. 2014

YOU KNOW YOU'RE AN EXCHANGE STUDENT IN AMERICA WHEN...

... you spend the entire first week in school trying to teach people how pronounce your name right (Which ends up as a total failure, so you end up responding to 20 different names, because everyone has their own way of saying it, or just call you "foreigner", "Denmark", or simply "Hey you!".)
... you ask someone if there is a "cinema" (which you were taught in English class back home) in the neighborhood, and everyone starts laughing at you, because apparently no one calls it a "cinema" but a "movie theater"
... you classify "doing homework" as typing it everything into Google Translate... and that alone takes three hours
... anyone that just smiles friendly at you in school, you call your friends... because you don't really have any friends yet
... you are super excited before your first ride with a yellow school bus. However, you're not that excited when you get off, because they are really not that comfortable.
... in every conversation you have, you say "uhm, what?" several times. And usually you still don't understand what people are saying, so you just end up nodding, smiling, and saying "yeahhhhh" and hoping it wasn't a question, because then it gets really awkward (Of course you have tried that too. More than once...)
... you've gotten out of trouble several times by using the excuse "But I'm foreign!"
... it becomes habit to introduce yourself by saying "Hi, my name is ... and I'm an exchange student from ..." (And you pronouce your name completely different than you normally would, because no one would have a clue what you're saying if you actually pronounced it right)
... you haven't met one single person who knows where your home country is (The closest guess I've heard to Denmark is "The capital of Sweden?".....)
... you get incredibly proud, and can't focus the rest of the hour, when a dane or Denmark is mentioned in one of your books
... people think it's a disaster, when you tell them that you've never had Macaroni n Cheese
... you're never sure if someone's being your friend, flirting, seducing you, or sexually harassing you.
... you calculate the time difference, between your home county and your host country, all the time
... Google Translate is your best friend
... all you do in sociology-class is talking about differences between your home county and your host country
... you panic you're home alone and the home phone suddenly starts ringing
... you meet a person from your host family (like an aunt or grandparent or so) for the first time, and you don't know whether you should hug, shake hands, or just make a little wave... so you end up with a polite smile and an awkward gesture that no one - including yourself - knows what's supposed to be.
... you cringe when you hear the words "baggage weight limit"
... you become really good friends with people you barely spoke to back home because they e-mail you more than the people you considered "good friends"
... you find it strangely difficult to speak in your native language and forget words you've known your whole life
... you do something wrong and people look at you weird, and you excuse yourself by saying "That's how we do it in my country", even if it isn't